Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [52]
His name was Radford Alden Wyatt. He never married. According to Sarah, he had not bathed in years.
“Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” as the saying goes.
In the case of the Wyatts, actually, it was more like shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in ten generations. They had been richer than most of their neighbors for at least that long. Sarah’s father was now selling off at rock-bottom prices all the treasures his ancestors had accumulated—English pewter, silver by Paul Revere, paintings of Wyatts as sea captains and merchants and preachers and lawyers, treasures from the China Trade.
“It’s so awful to see my father so low all the time,” said Sarah. “Is your father low, too?”
She was speaking of my fictitious father, the curator of Mr. McCone’s art collection. I could see him quite clearly then. I can’t see him at all now. “No,” I said.
“You’re so lucky,” she said.
“I guess so,” I said. My real father was in fact in easy circumstances. My mother and he had been able to bank almost every penny they made, and the bank they put their money in had not failed.
“If only people wouldn’t care so much about money,” she said. “I keep telling father that I don’t care about it. I don’t care about not going to Europe anymore. I hate school. I don’t want to go there anymore. I’m not learning anything. I’m glad we sold our boats. I was bored with them, anyway. I don’t need any clothes. I have enough clothes to last me a hundred years. He just won’t believe me. ‘I’ve let you down. I’ve let everybody down,’ he says.”
Her father, incidentally, was an inactive partner in the Wyatt Clock Company. This did not limit his liability in the radium-poisoning case, but his principal activity in the good old days had been as the largest yacht broker in Massachusetts. That business was utterly shot in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one, of course. And it, too, in the process of dying, left him with what he once described to me as “… a pile of worthless accounts-receivable as high as Mount Washington, and a pile of bills as high as Pike’s Peak.”
He, too, was a Harvard man—the captain of the undefeated swimming team of Nineteen-hundred and Eleven. After he lost everything, he would never work again. He would be supported by his wife, who would operate a catering service out of their home. They would die penniless.
So I am not the first Harvard man who had to be supported by his wife.
Peace.
Sarah said to me at the Arapahoe that she was sorry to be so depressing, that she knew we were supposed to have fun. She said she would really try to have fun.
It was then that the waiter, shepherded by the owner, delivered the first course, specified by Mr. McCone in Cleveland, so far away. It was a half-dozen Cotuit oysters for each of us. I had never eaten an oyster before.
“Bon appétit!” said the owner. I was thrilled. I had never had anybody say that to me before. I was so pleased to understand something in French without the help of an interpreter. I had studied French for four years in a Cleveland public high school, by the way, but I never found anyone who spoke the dialect I learned out there. It may have been French as it was spoken by Iroquois mercenaries in the French and Indian War.
Now the Gypsy violinist came to our table. He played with all possible hypocrisy and brilliance, in the frenzied expectation of a tip. I remembered that Mr. McCone had told me to tip lavishly. I had not so far tipped anyone. So I got out my billfold surreptitiously while the music was still going on, and I took from it what I thought was a one-dollar bill. A common laborer in those days would have worked ten hours for a dollar. I was about to make a lavish tip. Fifty cents would have put me quite high up in the spendthrift class. I wadded up the bill in my right hand, so as to tip with the quick grace of a magician when the music stopped.
The trouble was